Wish You We

For his first solo exhibition in New York, Stefan Vogel presents a new body of work that explores the material traces of a world in constant transformation. Moving between painting, sculpture, and installation, Vogel has developed a distinct visual language in which fragility and resilience, memory and loss, coexist in productive tension. Wish You Webegins with a simple yet unsettling proposition: How might our present appear when viewed from a distant future? What forms, materials, and gestures would endure? Vogel's works emerge from overlooked materialsfabric, dust, wire, paper, found objects, and architectural remnants. Removed from their original function, these elements become carriers of time. The provisional becomes method; incompleteness becomes form. Throughout the exhibition, the construction site appears not merely as a motif but as a condition: a space of building and dismantling, renewal and decay. In Vogel's practice, it becomes a metaphor for social, spatial, and psychological transformation. Nothing remains fixed, yet new structures continuously emerge from the traces of change. Many of the works oscillate between lightness and weight, exposure and resistance. Fabrics conceal and protect while simultaneously revealing their own vulnerability. Surfaces appear raw and immediate, yet disclose a precise sensitivity to material, rhythm, and space. What seems fragile acquires presence; what appears permanent reveals itself as temporary. Central to Vogel's practice is the notion of inscription. His canvases are never neutral supports but sites already marked by history. Cut, altered, and reconstructed, they carry visible and invisible traces of previous states. Memory appears not as repres entation but as a material condition. Stefan Vogel (b. 1981, Fürth, Germany) lives and works in Leipzig. He studied at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg and was awarded the Villa Romana Prize in 2016. H e was also fellow at the German Academy Rome, Villa Massimo. Vogel’s work has been exhibited at major institutions including Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, and Kunstmuseum Bonn, and was featured in the landmark exhibitionJetzt! Young Painting in Germany. His works are held in significant public and private collections, including the Federal Art Collection of Germany, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Philara Collection, and G2 Kunsthalle Leipzig.